Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

0 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

From babble to words: Infants' early productions match words and objects in their environment.

ABSTRACT: Infants' early babbling allows them to engage in proto-conversations with caretakers, well before clearly articulated, meaningful words are part of their productive lexicon. Moreover, the well-rehearsed sounds from babble serve as a perceptual 'filter', drawing infants' attention towards words that match the sounds they can reliably produce. Using naturalistic home recordings of 44 10-11-month-olds (an age with high variability in early speech sound production), this study tests whether infants' early consonant productions match words and objects in their environment. We find that infants' babble matches the consonants produced in their caregivers' speech. Infants with a well-established consonant repertoire also match their babble to objects in their environment. Our findings show that infants' early consonant productions are shaped by their input: by 10 months, the sounds of babble match what infants see and hear.

SUBMITTER: Laing C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7572567 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Publications

From babble to words: Infants' early productions match words and objects in their environment.

Laing Catherine C Bergelson Elika E

Cognitive psychology 20200603

Infants' early babbling allows them to engage in proto-conversations with caretakers, well before clearly articulated, meaningful words are part of their productive lexicon. Moreover, the well-rehearsed sounds from babble serve as a perceptual 'filter', drawing infants' attention towards words that match the sounds they can reliably produce. Using naturalistic home recordings of 44 10-11-month-olds (an age with high variability in early speech sound production), this study tests whether infants' ...[more]

PMID: 32504852

Similar Datasets

Posture affects how robots and infants map words to objects.

Project description:For infants, the first problem in learning a word is to map the word to its referent; a second problem is to remember that mapping when the word and/or referent are again encountered. Recent infant studies suggest that spatial location plays a key role in how infants solve both problems. Here we provide a new theoretical model and new empirical evidence on how the body - and its momentary posture - may be central to these processes. The present study uses a name-object mapping task in which names are either encountered in the absence of their target (experiments 1-3, 6 & 7), or when their target is present but in a location previously associated with a foil (experiments 4, 5, 8 & 9). A humanoid robot model (experiments 1-5) is used to instantiate and test the hypothesis that body-centric spatial location, and thus the bodies' momentary posture, is used to centrally bind the multimodal features of heard names and visual objects. The robot model is shown to replicate existing infant data and then to generate novel predictions, which are tested in new infant studies (experiments 6-9). Despite spatial location being task-irrelevant in this second set of experiments, infants use body-centric spatial contingency over temporal contingency to map the name to object. Both infants and the robot remember the name-object mapping even in new spatial locations. However, the robot model shows how this memory can emerge -not from separating bodily information from the word-object mapping as proposed in previous models of the role of space in word-object mapping - but through the body's momentary disposition in space.

| S-EPMC4364718 | biostudies-literature

Phonetic complexity of words immediately following utterance-initial productions in children who stutter.

Project description:PurposeThe purpose of the present study was to analyze phonetic complexity in the speech of children who stutter in a manner distinct from previous research with specific emphasis on three methodological considerations: (1) analysis of the word immediately following the initial word in the utterance; (2) accounting for other additional linguistic and lexical factors; and (3) discrimination of disfluency types produced.MethodsParent-child conversations were transcribed for 14 children who stutter (mean age=3 years, 7 months; SD=11.20 months) and coded for phonetic complexity using the Word Complexity Measure (WCM). Phonetic complexity of words immediately following the initial fluent or stuttered words of an utterance were included within binomial regression analyses, along with additional linguistic and lexical factors.ResultsAnalyses indicate that the phonetic complexity of the second word of an utterance was not a significant contributor to the likelihood of whole- or part-word repetitions on the preceding initial word of the utterance.ConclusionFindings support previous data that suggest the phonetic complexity of speech, at least as measured by the WCM, does not distinctly influence stuttered speech in preschool-age children.

| S-EPMC4762712 | biostudies-literature

Recognition of vocoded words and sentences in quiet and multi-talker babble with children and adults.

Project description:A vocoder is used to simulate cochlear-implant sound processing in normal-hearing listeners. Typically, there is rapid improvement in vocoded speech recognition, but it is unclear if the improvement rate differs across age groups and speech materials. Children (8-10 years) and young adults (18-26 years) were trained and tested over 2 days (4 hours) on recognition of eight-channel noise-vocoded words and sentences, in quiet and in the presence of multi-talker babble at signal-to-noise ratios of 0, +5, and +10 dB. Children achieved poorer performance than adults in all conditions, for both word and sentence recognition. With training, vocoded speech recognition improvement rates were not significantly different between children and adults, suggesting that improvement in learning how to process speech cues degraded via vocoding is absent of developmental differences across these age groups and types of speech materials. Furthermore, this result confirms that the acutely measured age difference in vocoded speech recognition persists after extended training.

| S-EPMC7771688 | biostudies-literature

Preverbal infants produce more protophones with artificial objects compared to natural objects.

Project description:Protophones are considered to be precursors of speech. These vocalizations have been notably discussed in relation to toys and their importance for developing language skills. However, little is known about how natural objects, compared to artificial objects, may affect protophone production, an approach that could additionally help reconstruct how language evolved. In the current study, we examined protophone production in 58 infants (4-18 months) while interacting with their caregivers when using natural objects, household items, and toys. The infants were recorded in their home environment, in a rural area in Zambia. The results showed that the infants produced significantly fewer protophones when using natural objects than when using household items or toys. Importantly, this pattern was found only for the younger preverbal infants, and there was no indication in the data that the level of caregiver responsiveness differed with regard to the object type. Furthermore, the infants of the present work selected primarily the household items when exposed to both natural objects and household items. These findings suggest that natural objects are less likely to promote protophone production and, consequently, language skill development than artificial objects in preverbal infants, who seem to favor the latter, perhaps due to their features designed for specific functional purposes. Furthermore, these findings provide empirical evidence that the use of complex tools in social interactions may have helped to promote the evolution of language among hominins.

| S-EPMC10282070 | biostudies-literature

Infants Segment Words from Songs-An EEG Study.

Project description:Children's songs are omnipresent and highly attractive stimuli in infants' input. Previous work suggests that infants process linguistic-phonetic information from simplified sung melodies. The present study investigated whether infants learn words from ecologically valid children's songs. Testing 40 Dutch-learning 10-month-olds in a familiarization-then-test electroencephalography (EEG) paradigm, this study asked whether infants can segment repeated target words embedded in songs during familiarization and subsequently recognize those words in continuous speech in the test phase. To replicate previous speech work and compare segmentation across modalities, infants participated in both song and speech sessions. Results showed a positive event-related potential (ERP) familiarity effect to the final compared to the first target occurrences during both song and speech familiarization. No evidence was found for word recognition in the test phase following either song or speech. Comparisons across the stimuli of the present and a comparable previous study suggested that acoustic prominence and speech rate may have contributed to the polarity of the ERP familiarity effect and its absence in the test phase. Overall, the present study provides evidence that 10-month-old infants can segment words embedded in songs, and it raises questions about the acoustic and other factors that enable or hinder infant word segmentation from songs and speech.

| S-EPMC7017257 | biostudies-literature

The acquisition of abstract words by young infants.

Project description:Young infants' learning of words for abstract concepts like 'all gone' and 'eat,' in contrast to their learning of more concrete words like 'apple' and 'shoe,' may follow a relatively protracted developmental course. We examined whether infants know such abstract words. Parents named one of two events shown in side-by-side videos while their 6-16-month-old infants (n=98) watched. On average, infants successfully looked at the named video by 10 months, but not earlier, and infants' looking at the named referent increased robustly at around 14 months. Six-month-olds already understand concrete words in this task (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012). A video-corpus analysis of unscripted mother-infant interaction showed that mothers used the tested abstract words less often in the presence of their referent events than they used concrete words in the presence of their referent objects. We suggest that referential uncertainty in abstract words' teaching conditions may explain the later acquisition of abstract than concrete words, and we discuss the possible role of changes in social-cognitive abilities over the 6-14 month period.

| S-EPMC3633664 | biostudies-literature

Discourse with Few Words: Coherence Statistics, Parent-Infant Actions on Objects, and Object Names.

Project description:The data for early object name learning is often conceptualized as a problem of mapping heard names to referents. However, infants do not hear object names as discrete events but rather in extended interactions organized around goal-directed actions on objects. The present study examined the statistical structure of the nonlinguistic events that surround parent naming of objects. Parents and 12-month -old infants were left alone in a room for 10 minutes with 32 objects available for exploration. Parent and infant handling of objects and parent naming of objects were coded. The four measured statistics were from measures used in the study of coherent discourse: (1) a frequency distribution in which actions were frequently directed to a few objects and more rarely to other objects; (2) repeated returns to the high-frequency objects over the 10-minute play period; (3) clustered repetitions, continuity, of actions on objects; and (4) structured networks of transitions among objects in play that connected all the played-with objects. Parent naming was infrequent but related to the statistics of object-directed actions. The implications of the discourse-like stream of actions are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that could support rapid learning of object names from relatively few name-object co-occurrences.

| S-EPMC10513098 | biostudies-literature

Positive effects of grasping virtual objects on memory for novel words in a second language.

Project description:Theories of embodied cognition describe language processing and representation as inherently connected to the sensorimotor experiences collected during acquisition. While children grasp their world, collect bodily experiences and name them, in second language (L2), students learn bilingual word lists. Experimental evidence shows that embodiment by mean of gestures enhances memory for words in L2. However, no study has been conducted on the effects of grasping in L2. In a virtual scenario, we trained 46 participants on 18 two- and three-syllabic words of Vimmi, an artificial corpus created for experimental purposes. The words were assigned concrete meanings of graspable objects. Six words were learned audio-visually, by reading the words projected on the wall and by hearing them. Another 6 words were trained by observation of virtual objects. Another 6 words were learned by observation and additional grasping the virtual objects. Thereafter participants were subministered free, cued recall, and reaction time tests in order to assess the word retention and the word recognition. After 30 days, the recall tests were repeated remotely to assess the memory in the long term. The results show that grasping of virtual objects can lead to superior memory performance and to lower reaction times during recognition.

| S-EPMC7329851 | biostudies-literature

Repetitive behavior with objects in infants developing autism predicts diagnosis and later social behavior as early as 9 months.

Project description:We evaluated repetitive behavior with objects in infants at risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from 9 to 36 months of age, and associations between early repetitive behavior and social engagement. Infant siblings of children with ASD (high-risk) or typical development (low-risk) were administered a task eliciting repetitive object use at 9, 12, 15, 18, 24, and 36 months of age. Infants (n = 147) were classified into 1 of 3 outcome groups at 36 months: Low-Risk Non-ASD (n = 58), High-Risk Non-ASD (n = 72), and ASD (n = 17). Behavior was coded from video for frequencies of unusual visual inspection, spinning, and rotating behaviors. Differences in unusual visual inspection were most prominent, consistent, and present earliest: At 9 months, the ASD group engaged in this behavior more frequently than both other groups, persisting through 36 months. Differences in frequencies of spinning and rotating were later-appearing, more time-limited, and/or related to familial ASD risk rather than ultimate diagnosis. Sensitivity and specificity estimates for the presence of unusual visual inspection at 9 months of age were in the moderate range (.60 and .68, respectively) for ASD versus Low-Risk Non-ASD comparisons, generally increasing over time. Unusual visual inspection at 9 months predicted 12-month social behavior controlling for 9-month social behavior, but not vice versa, with no evidence of moderation by ASD diagnosis. In summary, unusual visual inspection of objects is present and stable by 9 months of age in infants developing ASD and predicts reduced social engagement three-months later. Close monitoring of this behavior may aid early detection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

| S-EPMC8480432 | biostudies-literature

Quantitative Linguistic Predictors of Infants' Learning of Specific English Words.

Project description:To evaluate which features of spoken language aid infant word learning, a corpus of infant-directed speech (M. R. Brent & J. M. Siskind, 2001) was characterized on several linguistic dimensions and statistically related to the infants' vocabulary outcomes word by word. Comprehension (at 12 and 15 months) and production (15 months) were predicted by frequency, frequency of occurrence in one-word utterances, concreteness, utterance length, and typical duration. These features have been proposed to influence learning before, but here their relative contributions were measured. Mothers' data predicted learning in their own children better than in other children; thus, vocabulary is measurably aligned within families. These analyses provide a quantitative basis for claims concerning the relevance of several properties of maternal English speech in facilitating early word learning.

| S-EPMC5538897 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data